Emmanuel Gould (May 30, 1904 – July 19, 1975) was an American animated cartoonist from the 1920s to the 1970s, best known for his contributions as a director, writer and animator for Screen Gems, and solely an animator for Warner Bros. Cartoons and DePatie–Freleng Enterprises.[1]
Career
Manny Gould began his career as a teenager working for several New York-based animation studios, one of them being Inkwell Studios.[2] After being accused by the Fleischer's for infringement, he would leave and later partner with Ben Harrison to form the short lived Harrison-Gould studios. Both later moved to Winkler Pictures to work on the Krazy Kat cartoon series as animators, writers and directors. After Charles Mintz took over Winkler Pictures, the studio was moved to Los Angeles in 1929 to develop The Charles Mintz Studio (later renamed Screen Gems) after establishing a partnership with Columbia Pictures.[3] Also going with him were his sister Martha Barbara Gould and brothers Louis R., Allen, and Will Gould, a sports cartoonist for the Bronx Home News who drew the syndicated strip Red Barry in the 1930s and became a television and movie screenwriter.[4][5] Gould and Harrison were subsequently assigned a unit (mainly producing the Krazy Kat series), which they helmed as co-directors, animators and storymen for the following decade.
While Harrison's departure in 1940 dissolved their longtime partnership, Gould would continue to work for Mintz/Screen Gems until 1941, when Columbia decided to "clean house" by laying off their in-house staff. He, along with fellow Screen Gems alumni Arthur Davis, Lou Lilly and Frank Tashlin, arrived at the Warner Brothers cartoon studio in 1942 where he worked as an animator for Bob Clampett. He would be credited in Clampett's latter shorts in the mid 40's, such as Buckaroo Bugs(1944), Baby Bottleneck (1946), The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946) and The Big Snooze (1946). Clampett however, left Warner Bros. in 1946, and his unit was given to Arthur Davis. Gould would animate Davis' first three shorts until he moved to Robert McKimson's unit months later; his first on-screen credit under McKimson appears on 1947's Crowing Pains.
Gould was hired in 1947 by Jerry Fairbanks Productions as a director for its animation department,[6] where Lilly had gone to head the story department. His last credited cartoon at Warner Bros. (the Bugs Bunny short The Windblown Hare) was released in 1949, with his final contribution being Hippety Hopper the same year, where he was left uncredited. Lilly formed his own commercial animation company in 1952 and by the late 1950s hired Gould to be his animation director.
Style
Gould's animation is easily recognizable as his scenes can be identified by its loose rubber hose-styled animation. He tends to have his characters express themselves by "over-acting" with there hands or have them move in a graceful, yet bouncy manner. Sometimes he would also use deep perspective techniques, giving his animation a more three-dimension feeling to them. Devon Baxter notes Gould's style for its "broad distortion and foreshortening", while Micheal Barrier akin's his animation to "gaudy mini-carnivals".[7]
